


Homemade Hero

by sloppy



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Childhood Memories, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 17:39:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14049411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sloppy/pseuds/sloppy
Summary: The next day a brochure comes in through the family inbox for a space exploration cadetship program. Mama says it was, in verbatim, “Out of the blue.”





	Homemade Hero

**Author's Note:**

> Even though I shoved my big pre-Garrison!Lance oneshot into the doghouse indefinitely, I still wanted a family fic, so... hi.
> 
> Written post-s5.

His sister is leaning out the window, armpits resting on the sill, eyes up skyward. Lance is mesmerized by the back of her head, swirly and dark like his own. Veronica’s learning about space in class, so what she tells him is second-hand, with the occasional lovely, foreign speculation. The summer night has him sweaty, baby hairs matted against his forehead. Her modesty in prose leaves gaps to fill. His mind churns dinosaurs with three eyes and donut hole planets and other filaments of childish gluttony.  _We gotta go, Vero! I gotta see it all!_

But Lance doesn’t really start caring about stars and space and piloting what-else until much, much later, and by then we all know the story that comes after that. The in-between is the stuff he keeps to himself, if only because memories are savored best that way, and he unpacks them every time he looks through his Bayard scope and shoots down something purple. The blood isn’t red, and that’s wrong somehow, but maybe it’s good that it isn’t right either.

The stars thing gets stupid after Marco and Luis calls it stupid. Veronica blows up at them for that, but in the end the damage has been done. Lance stays up as late as his Mama would let him, watching lessons on his sister’s holopad on how to execute a perfect butterfly stroke. Or backstroke. Or where to order a bright red dragon floatie for a five year old. Marco and Luis don’t think swimming is stupid. Fast forward two years later, and Lance is following his brothers to the strip of beach lining the boardwalk after the sun has already set, blueish and black and what-once-was. The wind is harsher when the moon chaperones, and it beats at Lance’s fringe, thrashing against his face. Marco tells him they’re going for a dip. Luis is in his wetsuit. They tussle and play wrestle on the sand. Lance wiggles his bare toes, feeling the grains shift between them. By this age, he already knows how the sea feels when it crowds eagerly around his skin, unashamed of its affection. The water is his first love.

“Lancito,” his brothers call, already submerging into the shore. “Come! We’ll pull you up if the waves knock you over!”

The waves knock him over once, then twice. Lance doesn’t reach for the outstretched arms out of stubborn grit. All that matters is that he surfaces each time, lungs inhaling like a bagpipe ready for sound-off, and does his utmost not to sink. He spits out salt and holds his head above water and looks up at the expanse of stars that glitter down on him like faraway diamonds, enticing and mysterious. He stays afloat, half a daydream, until the tide takes him in again as jealous lovers ought.

Growing up, Lance considers being alone the same way he’d force himself to blink. Cousins and family friends and sniffly kids plucked from neighborhood streets, all dawdle by doorways or play with holodevices or mouth on snacks Mama had baked at dawn. Lance falls asleep in the sitting room with five other children, lulled by his grandfather’s rocking chair rambling. Summer nights he spends limbs-spread on the ryegrass lawn, parsing lightning bugs from starlight, while the uncles smoke and drink on the porch and cuss only half as well as their wives indoors. He joins his brothers and older cousins up in the attic, stamping dust bunnies into dust pies and uncovering bluetooths that are neither blue nor teeth. At dusk, Lance pillows his head on his sister’s shoulder, bleary-eyed as they listen to happily ever afters on her holo; an early stage of grooming the family romantic. Sliding a pudgy finger down the screen, he hovers over the image of young runaway sweethearts, fingers locked in immortal adulation.

The idea lingers like gum underfoot and he’s twelve when Lance finds himself holding Jenny Shaybon’s hand in a fanciful echo of something he should have forgotten a long time ago. Jenny is nice. Jenny is cool. Jenny has a best friend also named Jenny who hates Lance as much as he hates her, until he turns thirteen and realizes he’d been identifying the wrong emotion. In between Cool Jenny and Jenny-Piece-Of-His-Soul are what Veronica tragically refers to as the “Heartbreak Chronicles.” He doesn’t enjoy remembering that there are a few girls out there somewhere, walking around with Lance’s third, ninth, twentieth kisses like it’s the most natural thing in the world. But there’s only one girl that keeps him rolling. He sends countless unanswered e-messages to Jenny Loveofmylife driven by flaming emotion:  _I’m sorry i wrecked UR project board last yr in science I’m sorry i told the boys you practiced kissing on pillows. I think the way U laugh is so beautiful & How you smell like flowers evry time you walk by &I love how u always say what U mean. I would do anything 4 u i could see us married I will love you until i find someone better which is impossible._

“My sweet baby boy,” Mama croons the day Lance curls against her like he‘d never turned thirteen. “There is too much space in you, just like your father. We must teach you to take your fill.”

He sniffles, rubbing at his nose. “How do we do that?”

“Carefully,” she tells him, and from then on she speaks to him in English.

Lance picks it up quick since the slang’s popular at school and it’s all over the net anyway. He’s being tutored by Marco in five different subjects, and despite his condensed brain at the end of every lesson, Luis gets dragged into the edifying experience by coaching him in every sport known to man. Then comes the trips. Three hours inland to the hills, thirty minute drives to the boardwalk—even to the big cities Lance’s grandmother claimed sucked souls with their immaculate architecture and deadly hovercrafts. Mama instructs him to sing, paint, and study at every new location. Lance doesn’t improve in a lot. He’s a jack of barely any trades. Yet there’s something exhilarating about new things, even at the cost of exhaustion. He still swims when there’s a chance. They discover Lance’s knack for aim at a carnival fair, and next thing he knows, Mama’s ushering him to a meadowy patch behind the house to have him shoot with great grandpappy’s age-old rifle. He pops at holographic markers for ten minutes, misses only two, and gathers a crowd of relatives whooping and settled at the sidelines.

A lot happens before his fourteenth birthday. Veronica starts college. Luis runs away to the city to become a musician, then runs back like Mama said he would. Marco gets married and gets the girl pregnant, except not in that order. Lance relishes at the idea of finally having someone to bully right up till the moment he holds the fat pink ball in his arms. Its fingernails are the size of ladybugs and it has a tuft of brown hairs that are soft to the touch and Lance doesn’t stop with the tears because the love he currently feels is indescribably full.

They host Lance’s fourteenth birthday party at home and everybody in town shows up, even Jenny Shaybon and We-Are-Okay-Now Jenny. The food is predictably good and the music picks up when all the guests arrive. There are gifts in a blocky pile at the corner, and cake at the end of the meal. Lance has always reveled in attention, so he does some rounds and leads the dances and everyone tells him to have a happy birthday. Evening comes too soon and at the end his face is flushed, sweating, content. All the kids that haven’t gone home with the other adults stumble gleefully to the same beach Lance had nearly drowned in those years ago. The waters haven’t lost its love for him yet. This time, he doesn’t let it turn his head from the sky no matter how hard the tides push. He looks up and knows the stars are the same, have always been the same—just moved around a little, a bit like him. But there’s something about it now that calls to him. Around him kids are splashing and laughing, faraway moving pictures, the world peeling away strip by strip. Lance feels a thrum beat in his chest. He can taste the moonlight on his tongue like liquid myrrh.

The next day a brochure comes in through the family inbox for a space exploration cadetship program. Mama says it was, in verbatim, “Out of the blue.”


End file.
